How do I configure port-channel trunk ports between a Dell 6248 and ESX 3.5

I have four virtual machines and each need to be in their own VLAN. I have the 6248 configured for VLANs. I had a separate NIC for each virtual machine and everything worked fine. I now want to use two NICs on the ESX to handle the traffic for all four VLANs. I have set the VLAN IDs on the virtual NICs and I have configured the virtual switch to load balance using "Route based on ip hash". On the 6248 I have configured port-channel 1 and set the switchport mode to trunk and allowed the VLANs I want to use. One the ethernet ports I have added them to channel-group 1 mode auto.

If I do a Show Interfaces Port-channel 1 it shows both interfaces as being Inactive. What else do I need to configure to get this to work?

if mode general isn't supported on your switch - try with mode trunk, if you want vlan 1 to be native, change pvid 10 to pvid 1, get rid off vlan remove 1 - you shouldn't have to add vlan 1 untagged as it is default.

I know my ESX network is working correctly because if I remove the switch and just use one patch cable to connect the two NICs, I can ping both sides. Using the switch as it is currently configured, I can't ping to the other side.

I have moved into a lab so I can try commands without messing up my working network. Here is my config so far. Obviously there is no IP routing taking place yet. Currently I am just testing with VLAN 214.

I have two ESX servers each running four virtual vyatta routers. The vyatta routers are clustered across the network. Each ESX has a vSwitch with two physical NICs so I thought each vSwitch would need their own channel group.

Screen shots never hurt. And yes, you would need a port channel for each ESX server. Now on the ESX are you trying to pass through all the VLAN tagging to the Vyatta routers? Or do you want ESX to handle the decoding of the VLAN tags. Or possibly both?

So the correct order on the switch is create the trunk ports, create the port-channel groups, add the channel groups to the ethernet ports. or at least I think that is the way it is. I'm going to try it in my production environment and see what happens.

Well it is now working in production. It seemed from your post that I only needed to define the trunks/vlans in the port-channel but it looks like they need to be defined on the ethernet port and the port-channel.

Giving access to ESXi shell console is always an issue for IT departments to other Teams, or Projects. We need to find a way so that teams can use ESXTOP for their POCs, or tests without giving them the access to ESXi host shell console with a root …

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